CYBERDAGGER'S PROFILE

The Barbatos is dope as shit, so I made my avatar the Barbatos.

Yes, it's cool with me.

Bards can be deceptively awesome. Actually one of my favorite classes. And 5e made them full casters, so they no longer have the spell progression problem.

And you know what, I usually set my limit to five people, but I've occasionally run stuff for six. Last time I ran anything in meatspace at my uni's gaming society, I miscounted, thought I had five players, and there were six when we all got together in a room. Not wanting to be a dick and kick someone out, I opened Kobold Fight Club to adjust encounters and started with six. It went well enough.

So while I'm usually not too comfortable pushing the party size over five, it's nothing that I can't handle, and the textual nature of the forum may actually make things easier to handle. So yeah, guess I'm adding Max in.

And 5e is kinda like 3.X, but somewhat streamlined and with less number crunching. The transition should be easy. Things in like AC and attack bonuses scale slower than before, deliberately to make it so low level monsters in large numbers can still threaten high level characters. BAB, save growth charts, and skill points are gone, and a universal proficiency bonus that scales with level was introduced to handle the things they did before. Most situational bonuses and penalties that would add or subtract from rolls were replaced by advantage and disadvantage, in which you roll twice and take the highest or the lowest roll. Prepared spells are no longer tied to specific spell slots, so you don't need to prepare a spell multiple times if you want to cast it more than once; preparing a spell once lets you cast it as many times as you have spell slots. Also, you can power up spells by casting them on higher level spell slots, if you have them available.

author=ErikHolland
i'm thinking maybe in a rock-scissors-paper kind of way

Look into fighting games. A core part of most fighting games's gameplay is an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors. Blocks beat attacks, throws beat blocks, attacks beat throws. If you don't think throwing has a place in your game, maybe go for a Break action instead, that breaks guards but loses to faster attacks. (Speaking of that Attack/Guard/Break combination, Fate/EXTRA is one example of an RPG with a single party member that has you issue those commands in sequences against a similar sequence from the enemy and presents pattern recognition as its main challenge.)

But yeah, fighting games. They are real time, though, so not really translatable to a turn based RPG. So I would actually recommend you check out a card game called Yomi. It's made by an ex-fighting game pro, and it distills the mind games of fighting games into a turn-based card game system. It is rock-paper-scissors at its core, but winning with different plays wields different results, and each character has specific abilities that can be used strategically.